Many injuries occur or are made more severe because an operator of equipment is not wearing appropriate protective garments. Consequently, a means of insuring that an equipment operator wears appropriate protective garments would dramatically decrease both the number and severity of injuries. For example, there are over one million industrial eye injuries every year in the United States alone, and millions more in the rest of the world. Most of these injuries occur because workers do not wear eye protection such as safety glasses, goggles and face shields. This causes a great deal of unnecessary morbidity and psychological trauma to the injured and their families, and, in financial terms, is estimated to cost U.S. industry billions of dollars every year.
In addition to eye injuries, injuries to the extremities, especially the hands and fingers, occur with unnecessary frequency every year and add to the overall human and economic costs associated with industrial injuries.
Federal and local statutes have been enacted in an attempt to prevent industrial injuries from occurring. Protective eyewear and clothing is now required to be worn before operating machinery or exposing oneself to dangerous materials. Machines are designed with "intrusion detectors" to prevent injuries to hands and fingers. However, existing attempts to prevent industrial accidents do not offer a perfect solution to the problem. Machines with intrusion detectors may prevent injuries to the hand, but are still capable of ejecting flying debris that can injure the eye if the operator is not wearing proper eye protection. Even worse, devices like intrusion detectors can give an operator a false sense of security by lulling him into thinking that the intrusion detector alone is adequate protection when it is only a partial. Thus, other protective devices such as protective eyewear may be ignored, with potentially disastrous results. Moreover, existing Federal and local statutes and regulations are primarily aimed at requiring employers to provide safety equipment such as protective eyewear and protective clothing. However, even when given protective equipment, many workers simply forget or refuse to use it.
Garden equipment such as power edgers, weed cutters, and chain saws also contribute to the incidence of preventable accidents. Such accidents could be reduced or eliminated by appropriate protective garments.
Head injuries resulting from motorcycle accidents occur more frequently and more severely to motorcyclists who are not wearing protective helmets compared to motorcyclists who do wear helmets. Many states have enacted laws requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets, but such laws are difficult to enforce and are frequently ignored. Similar head injuries occur with bicycles, all-terrain-vehicles (ATVs), snow mobiles and like vehicles. Wearing helmets would prevent or reduce the severity of many such injuries.
The failure of operators of boats, jet skis, and other powered water-vehicles to wear life jackets or other floatation devices to prevent their drowning if incapacitated is another source of preventable injury.
Opening containers of, and using, toxic or caustic chemicals creates a potential for serious eye injuries, burns, and respiratory problems that could be virtually eliminated by wearing appropriate protective garments, such as goggles, face shields or hoods, protective suits, or respirators.
Similar paradigms exist for exposure to other dangerous environments, such as extreme (high and low) temperatures, exposed electrical conductors, radiation, oxygen-depleted atmosphere, excessive noise areas, high and low pressure areas and the like, all of which may be made less hazardous by wearing appropriate protective garments or devices. Further, even when protective garments or devices are used, their effectiveness is dependent upon their being worn or used in the proper manner.
Other dangerous conditions exist. For example, falls from scaffolding and other elevated structures and areas account for thousands of injuries and many needless death every year. Such accidents could be prevented or reduced by wearing safety harnesses, and by preventing access to elevated areas unless a workman is properly wearing the harness.
Handling and transportation of toxic chemicals is another circumstance which requires proper protection. Handling and transportation of toxic chemicals are dangerous activities, require much paperwork to insure that the chemicals are handled properly, and are not failsafe. Thus, workers can, at present, approach and handle toxic chemical containers and devices containing toxic chemicals without the appropriate protective equipment. This puts those workers at risk.
Additionally, the vast complexity of modern factories, such as chemical plants or nuclear plants, has made the task of evaluating the safety of performing new operations extraordinarily difficult. The problem is often compounded when, as is frequently done, subcontractors are employed. Because of their transient nature, subcontractors are often unfamiliar with the plant in which they find themselves working. A subcontract worker could inadvertently have access to and use of equipment in areas where use of that particular equipment should be prohibited. Such a dangerous condition is more likely to occur in a complex factory in which many unrelated systems exist in close proximity. While a worker may be safely working with one system, he might be creating, or exposed to, a hazard from an adjacent system. For example, repair operations using a torch may be approved for a warehouse with rapidly changing inventory. Between the time the repair procedure is approved and the time the repair work is actually performed, the warehouse may have received and be storing containers of flammable chemicals in the vicinity of the repair operations. Another possibility is that, as the repair job progresses, the repair job extends beyond the boundaries originally contemplated into an area where the use of a torch is dangerous. It is therefore desirable that certain tools, which may normally not be unreasonably dangerous to use but could be hazardous when used in certain areas or in certain environments, be equipped with a means of signalling their presence to one or more detectors in such areas or environments, so that an appropriate alarm may be sounded to alert workmen and others of a potential hazard situation.
There is thus a need for a protective system to protect an individual from exposure to dangerous conditions associated with machinery or other hazards which makes it impossible for the individual to operate the machinery or be exposed to the hazard without wearing the necessary protective equipment, or without wearing such equipment in the proper manner. The present invention fulfills that need.